Projection is a ubiquitous feature of human nature.  It is the cornerstone of evolution; what makes us human; the effect of an opposable thumb.  As soon as we could throw, we could make things happen; we could control the future (see  Projection, the missile of evolution. December 24^th, 2010), but this required us to perform the mental trick of imagination; to think the way things might be, to make believe. 

Psychological  projection performs that same mental trick, it transfers what we feel onto somebody else, to imagine it is they who have those some feelings and attitudes.  So we protect ourselves from  psychic damage by projecting the bad stuff onto  those we recognise already possess some of the characteristics we want to get rid of.  ‘She’s just so selfish.’  ‘I can’t trust him’.   He’s so lazy, careless, unreliable, fussy, messy.   This happens  all the time.  Just listen to how ‘a gossip of girls’ on the train criticise absent ‘friends’.  Look at how politicians try to achieve a semblance of dominance and control by rubbishing their competitors; how newspapers take hold of that and amplify it.  But it’s not just bad stuff.  Idealisation is a kind of projection.  When we admire somebody, respect somebody, fall in love with somebody, we transfer our wishes for how would like to be onto that person.  They become a mentor, a role model, an object of desire.  

Projection starts, like everything else, in childhood.   Children deal with uncomfortable feelings like fear and anger by externalising them.  First identify your enemy, locate all the bad stuff into them and then you can justify an attack.  Or identify the one you admire, locate all your wishes in that person and make them your best friend.  Projection is a mental trick.  There are goodies and baddies; in my childhood these were cowboys and Indians; the English and the Germans.  How differently you see things as you grow up.   Maturity is a state of recognising the bad feelings, taking them back and containing them, realising that what we criticise in other people is also part of us, accepting our essential humanity.    

Groups, organisations, institutions, governments, states, do it all the time.  They are pathologically split; they operate at a very childlike manner and project all their own concealed characteristics, especially the bad ones like unreliability, inadequacy, lack of sophistication, to say nothing of selfishness and ruthlessness onto  their competitors.  Colonel Gadaffi is currently the embodiment of all evil though only a few years ago, he was our special friend.  But the only thing that’s changed is our own projections.   Members of an exclusive culture,  music critics, art enthusiasts, historians, theatre buffs, vintage car collectors, can tend to puff themselves up by broadcasting their lacunae of esoterica to an audience they assume knows nothing and can be diminished by their ignorance.    

But projection can only really work in society if others identify with it.  This is what the psycholanalysts (another in- group) call projective identification or to put it in everyday speak, ‘how others make us feel’.   In voodoo, pointing the bone can cause others to feel so guilty by inference whether they are or not, that they slink away and die.  They have been ostracised from the tribe; they are not worthy to belong anymore and they cannot therefore survive.  Social exclusion is a powerful force; guilt and shame, powerful identifications.  People who have done something shameful to attract the projections of others, who use it as a shield for their own shame.  And it’s always the ones with most to be ashamed of that seek out those they can offload on to.  Those who feel unhappy make those who are close to them unhappy too  

Projective identification operates in so many aspects of human behaviour.   Bullies  can’t contain their own fear, so they make others frightened of them.  Suspicious people are secretive and engender mistrust and lies.  Needy people cannot give and induce need in others.  Those who are envious put on airs and graces to try to make others envy them.  Lovers who feel insecure may do something to make their partners feel jealous.  Unhappy and lonely people make those who are close to them unhappy too because at least they are toegether in their misery.  Teachers, who are not confident,  can make their students feel stupid,  but equally the over-confident student can make a teacher defensive.  ‘You make me feel sick,  you make me so angry, you just make me depressed.’    These are all common identifications within relationships. 

Those who carry a grudge are attracted to political groups, but can be very dangerous because they can cause others to feel bad and act out.   So did Ian Brady make Myra Hindley do it.  Projective identification is never a justification in law but it happens. 

War is mutual projection as each side used propaganda to unsettle the other.  Sport is the same.  Winning the mental battle wins the war or the tennis match.  Do not flinch; maintain the upper hand.   And we the observers so want the underdog, the good guy to win, we will do all we can to inspire him with our enthusiasm.  It almost worked with Tim and we’re trying our best with Andy, the nearly men of British tennis.      

Some doctors are so anxious they can make their patients terrified.  Michael Balint, the author of ‘The Doctor, the Patient and the Illness’ recognised this.  Patients pass the anxiety of not knowing what’s wrong with them on to the doctor, so that he orders more tests in order not to appear a failure.  Or their attitude may make their doctors feel angry, depressed, tired.   Emotional transference is such a powerful phenomenon.  As a therapist, I had always marvelled at how one client could make me feel so wound up and energetic; the next so tired I could fall asleep and have actually done so, but they were lying on the couch and I was sitting behind them and they never noticed.  

Actors are masters of projection.  They tune into their audience and can make us all identify with the emotions they project.  I have had two actors in therapy.  One made me feel so angry,  I actually had chest pain and needed to ask him to leave.  The other made me feel such surges of desire and compassion, it was all I could do not to take her in my arms and love her right there and then.     

But it’s not all negative.  We can also use projection to bring out the best in people.  Look at the way babies project their hunger onto their mother, who identifies with it and feeds them.  Falling in love feeds upon itself.   We project our beliefs and feelings into those whom we love and if they love us too and are a suitable object for our projection, they identify our desire and act in a way that intensifies it. 

Lovers  give each other those  feelings of security, excitement, togetherness, they’ve been looking for all their life, but what then happens to the bad feelings?   Well, if they can never let this love become as imperfect as the rest of life, then these feelings are projected out onto others, and the exclusive couple clings together united against the world, unable to trust anybody else.   But most marriages are not like that.  They are states of mutual projection and identification, and partners try to look after their own well being  by making their partners shoulder the blame and feel bad.  You never think!  You’re totally selfish!   I just can’t rely on you.  In a way they need the other to get rid of the bad feelings.   When it works well, it’s a trade off.    One may make the other feel alive while the other projects a feeling of safety.  It works.  The problems come when one of them changes the dynamic; meets somebody else, suffers a setback that destroys their confidence,  accepts a job that satisfies their needs.     

Projective identification requires us to think.  When somebody behaves angrily or badly to us, we need to reflect on our own attitude and behaviour and the reason for it.  How did it all start?  What was the trigger, the fear?   We all have responsibility in our functioning society to bring out the best in people, the most constructive response,  but in a narcissistic, self seeking society, people all too often have to have their own way, because ‘we’re worth it’.   It may be unfashionable to say, but I do believe that we have the friends, the colleagues, the children and the relationships we deserve because we help to make them the way they are for us

Why do we trust some people and not others?  Why do we admire some people?   Why do some people make us uncomfortable?  Is it because they remind us of significant figures in our lives; our mother, our father, a brother or sister, a lover, a husband, wife, a teacher?   Are they suitable objects for our projections?  

Projection is a ubiquitous feature of human nature.  It is the cornerstone of evolution; what makes us human; the effect of an opposable thumb.  As soon as we could throw, we could make things happen; we could control the future (see  Projection, the missile of evolution. December 24^th, 2010), but this required us to perform the mental trick of imagination; to think the way things might be, to make believe. 

Psychological  projection performs that same mental trick, it transfers what we feel onto somebody else, to imagine it is they who have those some feelings and attitudes.  So we protect ourselves from  psychic damage by projecting the bad stuff onto  those we recognise already possess some of the characteristics we want to get rid of.  ‘She’s just so selfish.’  ‘I can’t trust him’.   He’s so lazy, careless, unreliable, fussy, messy.   This happens  all the time.  Just listen to how ‘a gossip of girls’ on the train criticise absent ‘friends’.  Look at how politicians try to achieve a semblance of dominance and control by rubbishing their competitors; how newspapers take hold of that and amplify it.  But it’s not just bad stuff.  Idealisation is a kind of projection.  When we admire somebody, respect somebody, fall in love with somebody, we transfer our wishes for how would like to be onto that person.  They become a mentor, a role model, an object of desire.  

Projection starts, like everything else, in childhood.   Children deal with uncomfortable feelings like fear and anger by externalising them.  First identify your enemy, locate all the bad stuff into them and then you can justify an attack.  Or identify the one you admire, locate all your wishes in that person and make them your best friend.  Projection is a mental trick.  There are goodies and baddies; in my childhood these were cowboys and Indians; the English and the Germans.  How differently you see things as you grow up.   Maturity is a state of recognising the bad feelings, taking them back and containing them, realising that what we criticise in other people is also part of us, accepting our essential humanity.    

Groups, organisations, institutions, governments, states, do it all the time.  They are pathologically split; they operate at a very childlike manner and project all their own concealed characteristics, especially the bad ones like unreliability, inadequacy, lack of sophistication, to say nothing of selfishness and ruthlessness onto  their competitors.  Colonel Gadaffi is currently the embodiment of all evil though only a few years ago, he was our special friend.  But the only thing that’s changed is our own projections.   Members of an exclusive culture,  music critics, art enthusiasts, historians, theatre buffs, vintage car collectors, can tend to puff themselves up by broadcasting their lacunae of esoterica to an audience they assume knows nothing and can be diminished by their ignorance.    

But projection can only really work in society if others identify with it.  This is what the psycholanalysts (another in- group) call projective identification or to put it in everyday speak, ‘how others make us feel’.   In voodoo, pointing the bone can cause others to feel so guilty by inference whether they are or not, that they slink away and die.  They have been ostracised from the tribe; they are not worthy to belong anymore and they cannot therefore survive.  Social exclusion is a powerful force; guilt and shame, powerful identifications.  People who have done something shameful to attract the projections of others, who use it as a shield for their own shame.  And it’s always the ones with most to be ashamed of that seek out those they can offload on to.  Those who feel unhappy make those who are close to them unhappy too  

Projective identification operates in so many aspects of human behaviour.   Bullies  can’t contain their own fear, so they make others frightened of them.  Suspicious people are secretive and engender mistrust and lies.  Needy people cannot give and induce need in others.  Those who are envious put on airs and graces to try to make others envy them.  Lovers who feel insecure may do something to make their partners feel jealous.  Unhappy and lonely people make those who are close to them unhappy too because at least they are toegether in their misery.  Teachers, who are not confident,  can make their students feel stupid,  but equally the over-confident student can make a teacher defensive.  ‘You make me feel sick,  you make me so angry, you just make me depressed.’    These are all common identifications within relationships. 

Those who carry a grudge are attracted to political groups, but can be very dangerous because they can cause others to feel bad and act out.   So did Ian Brady make Myra Hindley do it.  Projective identification is never a justification in law but it happens. 

War is mutual projection as each side used propaganda to unsettle the other.  Sport is the same.  Winning the mental battle wins the war or the tennis match.  Do not flinch; maintain the upper hand.   And we the observers so want the underdog, the good guy to win, we will do all we can to inspire him with our enthusiasm.  It almost worked with Tim and we’re trying our best with Andy, the nearly men of British tennis.      

Some doctors are so anxious they can make their patients terrified.  Michael Balint, the author of ‘The Doctor, the Patient and the Illness’ recognised this.  Patients pass the anxiety of not knowing what’s wrong with them on to the doctor, so that he orders more tests in order not to appear a failure.  Or their attitude may make their doctors feel angry, depressed, tired.   Emotional transference is such a powerful phenomenon.  As a therapist, I had always marvelled at how one client could make me feel so wound up and energetic; the next so tired I could fall asleep and have actually done so, but they were lying on the couch and I was sitting behind them and they never noticed.  

Actors are masters of projection.  They tune into their audience and can make us all identify with the emotions they project.  I have had two actors in therapy.  One made me feel so angry,  I actually had chest pain and needed to ask him to leave.  The other made me feel such surges of desire and compassion, it was all I could do not to take her in my arms and love her right there and then.     

But it’s not all negative.  We can also use projection to bring out the best in people.  Look at the way babies project their hunger onto their mother, who identifies with it and feeds them.  Falling in love feeds upon itself.   We project our beliefs and feelings into those whom we love and if they love us too and are a suitable object for our projection, they identify our desire and act in a way that intensifies it. 

Lovers  give each other those  feelings of security, excitement, togetherness, they’ve been looking for all their life, but what then happens to the bad feelings?   Well, if they can never let this love become as imperfect as the rest of life, then these feelings are projected out onto others, and the exclusive couple clings together united against the world, unable to trust anybody else.   But most marriages are not like that.  They are states of mutual projection and identification, and partners try to look after their own well being  by making their partners shoulder the blame and feel bad.  You never think!  You’re totally selfish!   I just can’t rely on you.  In a way they need the other to get rid of the bad feelings.   When it works well, it’s a trade off.    One may make the other feel alive while the other projects a feeling of safety.  It works.  The problems come when one of them changes the dynamic; meets somebody else, suffers a setback that destroys their confidence,  accepts a job that satisfies their needs.     

Projective identification requires us to think.  When somebody behaves angrily or badly to us, we need to reflect on our own attitude and behaviour and the reason for it.  How did it all start?  What was the trigger, the fear?   We all have responsibility in our functioning society to bring out the best in people, the most constructive response,  but in a narcissistic, self seeking society, people all too often have to have their own way, because ‘we’re worth it’.   It may be unfashionable to say, but I do believe that we have the friends, the colleagues, the children and the relationships we deserve because we help to make them the way they are for us

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The King’s Speech, which was released on Saturday and stars Colin Firth as King George and Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth, is a moving and humorous account of Bertie’s relationship with his Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who helps him overcome his fears and deliver wartime speeches that rally the nation. 

The Royal Family have always been conscious of their role and their distance from the rest of society.   Some of the best bits of the film show how the King struggles to deal with Lionel Logue’s down to earth familiarity.  He is propelled to an apoplectic eloquence by the sight of Lionel lounging in the Coronation chair in the Abbey. 

Bertie is stuck between his instinctive desire for human affection and contact and his overwhelming sense of duty and obligation.  He is a fully paid up member of the firm, but he is also a loving father and husband and  needs Lionel as a friend as well as a therapist.  During the war, he had a close and understanding relationship with Churchill, who had also suffered with a speech impediment when he was younger and was also frightened of his father. 

Bertie, like many Royals, was brought up, not by his parents, who were always on duty, but by a nurse.  But the nurse preferred his older brother and was callous and cruel to Bertie, pinching him and depriving him of food so he lost weight.  David also used to tease him and his father,  King George V, had no patience with his stammering.  Queen Mary, his mother was stiff and distant, embarrassed by expressions of intimacy.  So Bertie, despite being second in line to the throne, had a lonely and abusive childhood.   

Bertie was also naturally left handed, but compelled to use his right hand.  This experience is not uncommon in people who stammer.    He had knock knees and suffered the pain of splints for years. 

The film revealed how stammering is not so much a fixed mechanical defect of speech but more an emotional disorder; the overwhelming effect of fear, fear of humiliation and with the loss of an effective means of communication with other human beings, of loneliness.

Bertie did not stammer if he sang the words, or when music was played into his ears at the same time.  When Lionel encouraged him to swear, utter the rudest words he could think of,  it threw Bertie into conflict; he was brought up to repress any expression that was improper.  But once he had permission,  he swore with gusto and no hesitation.  All these techniques facilitated emotional expression and eliminated his self consciousness.  He could communicate with his wife and daughters quite confidently,  but his brother, David and his father could readily reduce him to a state of paralysis.       

Lionel and Bertie remained friends for the rest of the latter’s life.  He was there to inspire confidence during all the King’s wartime speeches.  This was the Royal Family’s finest hour.  The audible and visible presence of the King and Queen in London during the blitz, their refusal to emigrate to Canada, the  bombing of Buckingham Palace, the young Princess Elizabeth driving ambulances endeared them to the British people.   But the King’s nervousness caught up with him.  Always needing cigarettes to relax him, the King died of bronchial carcinoma in 1952.

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The staff at Silverdales had agreed to write a letter and pack up her belongings and medications.  There was a slight hiccup when the Primary Care Trust demurred over funding her continuing health care, but Catherine reassured them that Abbeyfield also cared for some patients with dementia and after a delay of just two days they agreed.  I could scarcely believe how smoothly it had gone. 

We even had a window on the weather.  It had snowed the night before but the roads were passable and no more snow was forecast until the day after the move.  It was a little icy on the hill to mum’s flat, but I quickly gathered together her favourite pictures and ornaments, found her shoes and a warm blanket and set off to collect her from Silverdales.

The ward had been transformed into Santa’s grotto.  The staff were all in fancy dress.  An elf in stripey red stockings told me that mum wouldn’t come until she’d finished her coffee.  ‘Twas ever thus’, I said.  So I took her stuff down to the car and when I came back she was in the toilet and there was a queue of reindeer forming outside the door.

Betty was a little tearful.  I needed to explain to her several times that ‘No, Doris was not her mother in law and I was not her husband.’  It was all a bit too much for her, but she kissed mum and wished her a happy Christmas.  And so we took our leave of Santa’s helpers, the elves, the reindeer and the gnomes. 

The rather serious lady on reception was dressed in white with wings and a gold tinsel band round her head. 

‘Are you the fairy on top of the tree?’  I asked her as we went out.

‘No, she said, without a hint of a smile, ‘I’m an angel.’

Mum was quiet in the car and I put the radio on.  Every so often she would reach out, squeeze my hand and smile. Two hours later as we approached our destination,  I turned the radio off.  Almost immediately, she became fretful.   ‘I can’t get my breath.  Where’s my hanky.  I’m so hungry.  I want to go to the toilet. 

I explained again that she was going to Abbeyfield  House for Christmas and Simon and I would be just down the road.  I wasn’t sure she’d taken that in; she was much more concerned about lunch and going to the toilet.

 While Catherine got her a glass of sherry and some fish and chips for lunch, I went upstairs to personalise her room. I was going through the inventory with Kirstie when an agitated Catherine came in.  ‘Your mum is having an eppy.’

Close on her heels, mum appeared at the door, face as black as sin, but then she recognised me and smiled.  I showed her the pictures, the photographs of me and Simon, her chocolates and her musical lamp. 

‘What’s my stuff doing here?’

‘You’re staying here over Christmas. It’s really nice. Simon and I will be just down the road’ 

‘I’m not staying here.  I don’t like these people.  So you can just take all this stuff down and take me home.’

Then Catherine tried to persuade her.

‘And who are you?   You want to get rid of me too, I suppose.’ 

I tried a more robust approach.  ‘I’ll take you back to Silverdales, mum, if that’s what you want, but Simon and I will be here for Christmas. And it’s going to snow again.’ 

At that she started thumping her fists against my chest.  ‘Oh, so I’ve got to come to you.  Well, I’m not .  You –thump – can – thump – come – thump – to me!  Big thump!

Ok mum, we’ll take you back.  Let’s just hope the snow stays off.

I rang Sheriott.  Her room at Silverdales was still available. The journey back was a repeat of the  morning’s expedition.  She was quiet and we listened to the radio. 

Santa’s little helpers took her off into the day room to join the elves still preparing for Christmas while I went to put her stuff away.  

A few minutes later, she appeared at the door.  ‘Nobody is talking to me in there.’

‘Never mind mum’

‘Do you want a chocolate, dear?’

‘Oh, yes please, mum. Then I must go before it snows. ’

‘Well, it’s been a lovely day.  Thank you so much darling!’

Isn’t it tragic when fear forces people into actions that you know will harm them and you can’t do anything about it?   

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Wally had worn his best suit, a smart three piece Harris Tweed with Pavane of Paris on the label.  He sat at the table just inside the door alongside the still debonair Michael, who had flown Spits, and    greeted his guests as they arrived.  He was polite and charming as ever; he’d had years of experience, but with a slight mist of vacancy that the Prince of Wales tends to adopt, as if he knew he knew them but couldn’t quite place it.  But they knew the script and so did he.  One by one, they fed him the comic leads and right on cue, he never failed to come up with the expected response.  His eccentricity was so much more acceptable now that he was older.  He had grown into the part.  Peter, who had first announced himself to me as ‘Piss ‘ed Pete from Pitminster’, before taking a chip or two from dad’s plate, parked his tractor behind the hedge and came in with glasses askew and dressed in his trade-mark navy-blue boiler suit.  ‘You’re a star turn, Wally,’ he declared – a compliment dad acknowledged with courtly bow and wave.  

Wally was still an outrageous flirt, only now he could get away with it.  When the barmaid, buxom and pretty, asked him if he would like anything else, he had replied, eyes a twinkle ‘yes, darling, you on my knee.’ 

Two of his ‘old flames’ turned up.  Heather drove in from Langport.   She must have been in her eighties, but was still an attractive woman. She had been his secretary.  ‘And as for that Heather Ridgeway’, her name erupted frequently during the rows between mum and dad during our last year at Blagdon.  But she was engaged in secret trysts with Ron by that time.  Peggy was about the same age and now lived by herself in a cottage in Staplehay.  She winked broadly at me after he had given her that  particularly wet embrace her reserved for prize crumpet, ‘Your dad was always such a rascal.’

It must have been at least fifty years, since he had last seen Bryan.  His wicked eyes and waxed moustache gave him the air of an elderly  country squire; a latter day Sir Jasper.  They had worked together in the Northern Assurance Offices in the thirties.  He recalled them going to dances with some local floosies and dad stealing bottles of whisky, which he hid in the tails of his frock coat.   Dad stared at him, smiling, as if he were listening to a story on the radio.  But if Bryan was disappointed, he didn’t let on.       

But there were few that remembered dad before his accident, and none that he would remember. As his sister, Doreen put it, he went to war a laughing boy and came back a truculent middle-aged man.  The extensive damage to his frontal lobes, he had sustained when he was thrown from the cockpit of his Hurricane, had all but destroyed his personality along with a large tranche of memory.  To survive, he’s had to reinvent himself.  It was particularly hard on mum, they had had just a weekend of married life together before he had to join his squadron in the Orkneys, and then he’d crashed and he was never again the man she had married.  He’d had to reinvent himself.  After four years rehabilitation in my grandmothers pub, he was able to return to work but as a different person. 

Most of the guests only knew Wally in his reincarnation.  But they were all like extensions of the personality created for himself, bit players in the production called Wally, what he would like to be.  I suppose that also applied to me and Simon. We had in his eyes the social standing he aspired to, me the doctor, Simon the artist.   They were all characters,  larger than life, caricatures from an age that was fast disappearing.  Grizzly looked a bit like Eadward Muybridge in his full grey beard, but was a farm worker from Clayhidon who had drunk a bit too much cider.   Paddy trained race horses, kept a stable of women, and was always in a bit of bother with the authorities. He pulled me to one side and from beneath his coat showed me a photograph, no not of a lady, but of a slightly pot bellied horse and said furtively .  Champion steeplechaser, this Nick.  I just want one more person to put in ten grand and he’s yours.  I’ll do all the training of course.  Ginge had dressed himself up in a smart blue suit and a red tie around the collar of his check shirt, but his uncut red hair sprouted from his head like a carrot top. I don’t like to think of the times he had wheedled cash out of dad, but he still brought a beautifully Sunday roast up to the house every week. 

But it would be a mistake to regard all of dad’s friends were rogues and vagabonds.  Many, such as Jonathan the doctor, who lived in the Brigadier’s house, John the airline pilot, Graham and Joanie who used to run a retail outlet in Romford, and Richard the solicitor, added a certain air of respectability to the ménage.  Richard wore a smart white suit and looked happy and debonair and had a whispy blonde on his arm, whom he announced as my fiancée.  He was a different man since his tumour had been removed.  Robby was sitting with his daughter and Tigger the dog, he had bought to console him after his wife had run off with the secretary of the golf club. 

Two years older than Wally and so sharp and vivacious, Anne his sister, whom we as children always knew as Auntie Flossie, that is until she adopted her middle name as more becoming, flirted with Michael.  She helped dad cut the cake,  but couldn’t stop him spilling his wine over it and then smudging the imprinted photograph of  a smoulderingly handsome 16 year old Wallace, dressed in the puritan’s uniform of Queen Elizabeth’s College.  The school said he was good enough to get a scholarship to Oxford,  but he left school instead to join an insurance company.  ‘That way, I could meet a better class of crumpet than I ever could as a student.’  

It didn’t seem right for me to tell funny stories about Wally; too many conflicting memories, I guess.  And I wanted to remember my father, not as a figure of ridicule,  but as a survivor, a kind, generous and even curiously wise man, who inspired great affection in people and who I could respect.  So I  thanked everyone for their support they had given to dad over the years and then deferred to Paddy, who looked panic stricken and instead led a boisterous chorus of Happy Birthday and Three Cheers for Wally. 

There were tears in his eyes as we drove back through Blagdon, up the hill and round the hairpin bend.   He was quiet but as we drew up in the yard and the lights came on, he turned to me and Simon.

‘Nice crowd there tonight.’

‘Yes’

‘Didn’t know any of them!

‘Oh’

‘Nice place!.’

‘Yes’

‘Easy!’

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in the bone white dish,

a cargo of garlic;

ten bruise-pink cloves

in a nest  of papery skins,

like dormant commas

awaiting the next sentence.

.

The station clock was at quarter to ten.

I’m going to plant them, you said.

‘They need to catch the first frost, and perhaps,     

 next year,

we’ll cook together.’

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I try to gain her attention.  ‘Hello mum.  Nice to see you.’  There is no response, then like a beast in a field, she gradually turns her head and stares into my eyes, a look of slow reproach tinged with confusion as if she knows she knows me but can’t quite work it out.  It’s like her slow memory of me doesn’t quite fit.  She has gone to another place; a place that I had put her, a place where I can’t follow. 

 With infinite sadness, she moves her head across, leans her head into the gap between my shoulder and neck.  I stroke her hair, silky grey,  washed and combed that morning.  She pulls away, looks at me for longer  – mum was always good at the long looks.  I meet her gaze, hold it, will myself to energise the connection  -   but her battery is low, the circuits  slow, faltering, missing.  Then a glimmer in the hooded eyes, a recognition.  A flash of panic.  ‘Too much, too much.  She looks down, puts a hand up to her face as if to weep, but buries her nose in it instead,  as if hiding from an intolerable reality.   After a while, she looks up again, makes as if to speak.  Perhaps, even now, there will be a meaningful comment, something I can console myself with, when her body has gone and the formalities complete.  I put my ear to her lips. 

‘I want to go to the toilet.’

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But there’s more to it than that.  Dogs offer us their devotion.  To them we  are the pack leaders – to be appeased and served. Dogs are attuned to us, they obey our commands, respond appropriately when we point; they can be trained. Chimpanzees, although they have 99% of  our genetic code, tend to do their own thing, albeit intelligently. There is even a dog who has learnt 300 words and can fetch an object from another room, having only just seen a picture of it.  And think of how working dogs can be trained to herd sheep, to retrieve an animal that been shot, to sniff out drugs or explosives.   

Dogs make a deep emotional bond with us.  Studies have shown that when dogs look at images of humans, they are drawn to the left side of the face which expresses emotion more eloquently and has a direct connection with the emotional right side of the brain.  They tune into our emotions and can respond to our feelings.  They know when we are upset or angry. They feel it. And dogs are good for us.  We are more likely to survive a myocardial infarction if we have a dog and less likely to have another heart attack.  

Dogs have evolved an elaborate vocal repertoire to communicate with us.  Most dog owners can recognize at least six types of bark.  These are emotional signals; excitement, anger, aggression, hurt, fear, playfulness.  Brains scans have shown that the same area of orbito-frontal cortex lights up and we release the bonding hormone, oxytocin, when we look at pictures of dogs as when we look at images of children.  Our need to nurture runs deep. Dogs induce the nurturing behaviour in us they need for survival, and they also release oxytocin when they look at their owners and are fondled.  Dogs not only give but they induce unconditional love. 

DNA data has established that our domestic dog is descended from the grey wolf and came into existence about 100,000 years.  But wolves or wild dogs do not acclimatize to humans naturally. They cannot read our emotions and they don’t have the same vocal repertoire.  When wolf puppies are brought up with humans, they revert to wolves at about 8 weeks and become dangerous.  It takes many generations of selective breeding to get an animal that behaves like a dog.  Long term experiments conducted on Silver Foxes in Eastern Siberia has shown that domesticity can only be induced after 50 generations.  Only then do they behave like dogs. The strange thing is that in breeding out aggression, other characteristics change too, like the colour of their coats and the shape of their heads, their ears and their tails.  In fact, they become like puppies.  Selective breeding for domesticity favours juvenile characteristics.

This makes me wonder whether sexual selection in human societies over the many generations since civilization began has also succeeded in breeding out aggressive characteristics?   Are we just all big babies?   Have we bred domesticity in ourselves and with this passivity, laziness, neediness and a predisposition to obesity, heart attacks and diseases related to anxiety, such as Fibromyalgia and Irritable Bowel Syndrome?    

Contrast our open faced, needy population with the hard bitten images of tribal chieftains, warlords who seize and impregnate their women by force.  Such brutal sexual acquisition might perpetuate a much more ruthless typology until such time as civilization suppresses the behaviour that has induced it?  The aggressive no longer rule the earth,  at least outside the strongholds of Afghanistan, but have we become too tame, like the dogs? 

This article was the topic of a Horizon documetary, shown on BBC television last week.

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The opening sequences set the mood, time passing in the ticks and strikes of the clocks, the unrelenting passion of the crimson carpets, walls and drapes.  We see a woman or is it a man; the angular face and lank hair obviate sexuality.  She is lying in bed.  Another woman, plump and beautiful with ringlets of honey blonde hair lies asleep in a chair.  The invalid gets up stiffly and walks painfully across to her bureau and writes in her diary, ‘It is Monday and I am in pain.’ 

Agnes is dying of cancer.  Her sisters, Karin and Maria, have returned to look after her, but it is the peasant Anna with her plump expressionless face and simple faith who loves and cares for her.  ‘In elliptical flashbacks, intended to give us emotional information, not tell a story, we learn that the three sisters have made little of their lives.’ Karin is icily detached, married to an older husband, a calculating, sneering diplomat, whom she loathes. She cannot bear to be touched and in one awful scene lacerates her cunt with a broken glass and smears the blood over her lips to avoid her husband’s attentions.  Maria is beautiful, but corrupt and heartless.  She is married to a weak man, whom she despises and so she consoles herself with other liaisons.  When her husband stabs himself and pleads for help, she turns away.  Maria and Karin were close as children, but are now too damaged to allow any real intimacy.  Agnes always felt isolated, especially from their tragic though beautiful mother.      

Theirs is not a happy house, it’s a place of guilt and repression, cries and whispers.  Nobody can get close enough to draw comfort from anybody else.  Agnes is in agony, her back arched as she struggles to breathe, desperate for human warmth, but her sisters turn away.  Only Anna can console her, pillowing her head in the living flesh of her breasts to ease her terrible transition.   

Cries and Whispers is a disturbing film, a film about life and death.  It’s not only Agnes who is dying.  Karin and Maria are too, and in a way, we all are.  Their lives have no hope, no meaning.  Karin works while Maria plays, but these are evasions.  Theirs is a simalcrum.   Without human warmth, without love, there can be no life.   Paradoxically, it is Agnes,  who finds life  in simple pleasures, the garden, a drink of water and the comfort of  being held.   So Bergman presents us with a contrast, a counterpoint between the hopelessness, defensiveness and meaninglessness of  Karin and Maria’s lives with their compromises, pretences and terror of real contact and the dreadful void of death that confronts Agnes.  

Bergman does not spare us the shock and horror.  Harriet Andersson is not beautiful in death; sweat glistens on her angular face, her hair is lank, her skin pale and grey, her eyes terrified;  she arches her back, she drags air into her damaged lungs with long, tortured stridor, she retches, she beats her fists on her barren, wasted chest. 

The cinematography is superb.  As the critic, Roger Ebert, wrote, ‘The camera is as uneasy as we are. It stays at rest mostly, but when it moves it doesn’t always follow smooth, symmetrical progressions. It darts, it falls back, is stunned. It lingers on close-ups of faces with the impassivity of God. It continues to look when we want to turn away; it is not moved.  Agnes lies thrown on her death bed, her body shuddered by horrible, deep, gasping breaths, as she fights for air. The sisters turn away, and we want to, too.’  We know things are this bad, but we don’t want to have to feel it.  The scene of  Anna embracing the decomposing Agnes has all the soul searching depth of a Rembrandt,  the horror of embracing death but at the same time a moving and familiar reminder of the pieta.   So the death of Agnes  represents the corruption of humanity.  And here again we have the dialectic;  life in death and death in life.   This film gets as close as any film can get to the crimson membrane of passion and sexual disquiet that for Bergman is the soul.  

Cries and Whispers has little narrative.  We don’t know how the major characters arrived there; we are left to fill in the gaps from the darkness of our own experience.  This is the power of Bergman.  He does not attempt to explain; he just shows us what its like.  He communicates on a level of human feeling so deep that defies description – but how well he communicates.

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It was like a metronome, every second.  Simon worked out that at this rate, she would say oh dear, 3600 times an hour,  up to 50,000 times a day,  15 million times a year.  But the mantra had some more intense variations;  ‘oh no,  oh no, oh no’ or just ‘no, no, no no’, and worse still, ‘oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please’ and then ‘oh Nick, oh Nick, oh Nick’  Anybody listening to this would be bound to think, ‘Whatever is he doing to that poor woman?’ 

Every so often she would stop and ask where we were going.

‘We going to Chatsworth mum. You know to my cottage’ and I’d make a motion with my hand as if to open the latch. 

‘Chatsworth.’, she’d say puzzled and then she would get it.

‘They brought the lambs in.’ 

‘Yes that’s right.’

‘What are we going there for?’

‘We’re going to have tea; turkey sandwiches, Christmas cake, mince pies.’

‘You going to leave me there.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘We’ll have tea and then take you back home.’

‘Home?’

‘Yes, to your flat.’

‘My flat?’

‘Yes, number 9 the Woodlands, Shore Lane.’

‘Do I live there?

‘Yes.’

‘And then you’re going to leave me to walk?’

‘No!’

And the litany would all start again, ‘oh no, oh no, please, oh please’.

It is all very tiring.  Although I am not doing anything awful to her, it feels like it.  The reality is that her life is dreadful. She has lost her identity.  She cannot remember anything from one moment to the next and so everything is alien to her, confusing. She  doesn’t know where she is or what is happening. 

And so a pleasant drive in the country is torture to her.  She has been taken out of her environment along roads she can barely remember to an unknown destination for no clear purpose.  And because she has never really been able to trust that things will be allright, she fears she will be abandoned and never find her way back.  It must be terrifying. 

When the Red Army invaded East Prussia in the winter of 1945, millions of people were forced by fear of murder and rape to flee their homes and join the columns of refugees escaping in sub zero temperatures towards the west.  That was their dreadful reality.  They didn’t know where they were going or why and many died on the way. Mum’s world must seem just as threatening.  She does not know where she is, she has no home and she sees confusion and danger everywhere.  Sometimes when I have to repeat the same facts to her for the twentieth time, it is important to realize that this an anchor point, however ephemeral, in a devastated world.

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Royale Tennenbaum has been evicted from his family by his wife, Etheline, for playing around. He is casual, careless even as he explains it to his three genius children,  Chas, the financial whizz, Richie, the tennis star and Margot, the playwrite.  17 years later he wants to be reconciled with his family; he wants to make amends; he is seeking redemption. Besides, he has lost his money and has nowhere to live. 

But by that time, his children are pretty messed up. Chas is neurotic; he has lost his wife in an air crash and is bringing up his two boys (all three of them dressed in identical red shell suits) in a rigorous health and safety regime. Richie is depressed; he broke down during a grand slam final and now travels the world alone on his private yacht. Margot is bored, married to a neurologist, but spends most of her days locked in the bathroom, secretly smoking and watching television.  They are all regressed. Gratification is either oral, as in Margot’s cigarettes, or anal, as in Chas’s schedules and lists. There is not a lot of sex and what there is, does not seem much fun. Their lives are fantasy; the real world is anaesthetized. They are bored and aggrieved. In their own ways, they all feel their father has betrayed and failed them. They are stuck.     

Etheline holds the balance between love and hate. She is the controller, the Jewish mother who single-mindedly created the three gifted prodigies. Narcissistically embroiled in her own sacrifice, she maintains the split between the good mother and the bad father. She wants retribution. Her children are her agents, but at the expense of their own freedom.  They have never been able to separate from her. They need a third point of view provided by a redeemed father in order to leave the family jungle and explore the savannah.  . 

To gain entry to the family home, Royale pretends he is dying of cancer. The children return too, bearing their grievances and sorrows.  Margot was always treated as the adopted child by Royal, who dismissed her first play as ‘a lot of kids running around in animal costumes’.  Richie is still in love with Margot since their teenage escape camping out in the Africa section of the Natural History Museum.  Chas retains the BB lodged between his fingers after being treacherously shot by his father during a game at the summer house. ‘But you’re meant to be on my team!’  Perpetual grievance is a failure to thrive. The world is not composed of perpetrators and victims; it is much more complex and messy than that.   

Royale’s deception is discovered.  He is sent away again, though not before he has made contact with his family by subverting his grandsons to the excitement of risk.  Slowly, the family come to enjoy the vital intention of his comic duplicity, but reconciliation is only complete after he has really died.  

As long as their parents are unable to behave as adults, the children cannot grow up either. It takes Royal’s return and his sincere expression of remorse for Etheline, Margot, Richie and Chas to risk forgiveness and feel pity.  Royale is an agent of remembering. The  acknowledgement of his failure as a father and his desire to make amends awakens the  children from their symbolic death. He has given them the greatest gift any father can give their children; his humanity. Their lives can now be realized through forgiveness. 

To err is human, to forgive divine. To grow in wisdom, we all need to forgive the bad and  bring out the good, but that can be so hard to do.  It is said that you can only forgive others if you forgive yourself, but some just accept all the blame; they forgive everybody else but never forgive themselves. The hardest thing of all is to acknowledge your own faults and sins, to be open about them and to forgive them. Yet that way is life.

So, express remorse  without qualifications. Hold up your hands.  Say, ‘Yes, I’ve behaved like a shit!’  Royale Tennenbaum has had to come to terms with his own selfishness and the abandonment of his children.  Gestation, even late gestation, is the parental act of becoming oneself.  That way is life, because it accepts the essential human failings without condoning the misdemeanors that have ensued.   

But what does it take to forgive or be forgiven.  Royal could only be forgiven if he threatened death. In a curious Christian re-enactment, the father had to die so that the children might live, if not in reality, in meaning.  The mythic father has to be killed off and redeemed by a different kind of dad, less yet so much more; a dad that can be forgiven and eventually forgotten. 

This article was inspired by and in part plagiarised from a talk, entitled Failing Better, which was presented by Dr Alan Lidmila to The Hallam Institute of Psychotherapy on Saturday 28^th November at the Showroom, Sheffield,  following a showing of Royale Tennenbaums, directed by Wes Anderson.    

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